Roland Barthes’ 1968 essay The Death of the Author is in some ways an annoying text. For those unfamiliar with his argument, Barthes invites us to view writing as a "performance" - once a text is written, the author ("a modern figure") exits and the reader enters to make sense of it.

I appreciate Barthes' essay, yet I do think the author is still alive and does matter. Let me explain. By writing, we sometimes enable others to see what was otherwise invisible to them – which is quite something in itself. But also, the author’s voice is always in the text, even if at times more in the foreground than at others.

In my own research work, I sometimes make a conscious effort to “bring myself into the writing” – e.g. by adding a personal foreword or epilogue, or by using phrases like “in my experience”. This reflects my sceptical attitude to objectivity – which in my view is impossible, not even desirable, especially when writing about complex matters that are not susceptible to scientific analysis. So there is no such thing as an “authorless” text. And yet… what I do appreciate about Barthes is the spotlight he shines on the reader. I first really started to think about the complex nature of the act of reading when I encountered George Herbert Mead’s thinking. It took me a long time – and immersion in a book that I might previously have abandoned as unreadable – to work out that “meaning” is not a thing to be pinpointed. Instead, through Mead, I came to understand communication essentially as a process of gesture and response. The meaning of a text therefore lies as much in the reader’s response as in the writer’s intention. It is not located, strictly speaking, in the text itself. (I sometimes drop the word “meaning”, which always seems to suggest something fixed, static or unnegotiable, and replace it with words like “new thinking”.) All in all, reading is a complex, interactive and creative process. Each of us comes to a text with our own experience, thought patterns, interests, emotions, imagination and internal dialogue. When we read, we make new connections and we may also experience new feelings or an impulse to act.But if we accept the reader’s active role in making sense of the text, what about the author? Like the reader, the author brings to the writing his or her experience and imagination. And when we write, we also have intentions. These might, for example, simply be to express our thoughts and feelings, or we may want to provoke or influence people or reveal something previously hidden. This is all a far cry from the “sender-receiver” model of communication, which people may dismiss as simplistic or misleading but which, I suspect, still has quite a grip on us subconsciously. If we think, then, about the whole process of written communication, there are two types of creative moment involved: the moment when the writer writes, and the moment when the reader reads. In between these two interactive phases, the text itself remains essentially just marks on a page. And that’s not in any way a negative statement. Indeed, those marks on the page are almost magical. They wait there until the next reader turns up and starts to engage with them, in his or her own way. Pretty amazing, considering that our alphabet consists of just 26 very reduced signs. The first reader may even be the author herself. Having put her thoughts down on the page, she can go back to them later and enter a dialogue with them, thus developing her thinking even further. Indeed, the dormant words can be reawakened years or even centuries after they have been written (provided the medium they were created in is preserved that long).

I am not ready to read the author's obituary yet.

Related reading:

Roland Barthes. “The death of the author”, in Image Music Text (Fontana Press, 1977)

Wolfgang Iser. The act of reading: a theory of aesthetic response (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)

George Herbert Mead. Mind, Self, and Society. (The University of Chicago Press, 1934)